"For too long, companies have been able to hide their damaging activities through accounting tricks, tax loopholes, and unethical advertising."

These are not the words of an NGO campaigner but of the former banker and high profile economist Pavan Sukhdev, who on Friday launched a campaign at Rio+20 Earth summit to put pressure on the corporate sector to change its destructive ways.

Sukhdev, who led the UN's TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) report and UNEP's green economy initiative, announced the creation of the Corporation 2020 movement, which seeks to harness the power of civil society and governments to change the archaic legal structure that determines corporate behaviour.

"It has become clear that business-as-usual will not be able to last very far into the future without making significant changes," he says. "Instead of a single-goal, cost externalising machine maximising financial capital for its own shareholders, business should maximise financial capital, human capital, social capital, and natural capital for its shareholders and its stakeholders."

The most radical aspect of the campaign, which will be co-ordinated by America's Yale University Center for Business and the Environment, is a call for governments to put a legal limit on the ability of companies to leverage finance, arguing that they pose the same systemic risks as banks.

Sukhdev, is speaking at 20 events at Rio to secure support for the campaign. He says he decided to create Corporation 2020 because writing endless reports is not going to force businesses to relinquish power.

"There is no point in asking for change at a macro or sector level without also targeting change at the agent level. We have a serious agency problem. Corporations are 60% of GDP and 70% of global employment and left to themselves, 'Corporation 1920' type companies are unlikely to create the green economy. As the saying goes, turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

"In addition to Puma, Unilever, Infosys, Natura, etc showing the way forward, we also need civil society and governments to weigh in, hence the public campaign."

Corporation 2020 recommends the introduction of capital adequacy requirements for businesses above a certain size so they conform to prudential capital management standards. Currently these apply only to banks and financial institutions.

It argues that car companies, utilities, insurers, and mortgage originators can be "too big to fail" which means that public capital is being put at risk by these corporations.

Sukhdev says: "Over-leverage or misuse of leverage has systemic risk implications, and yet, very few central banks regulate corporate leverage. In the world of Corporation 2020, financial leverage would be limited by regulations that align corporate interests better with societal goals such as financial and economic stability. At present, this task is left largely to investors, with fund managers becoming the unlikely conscience-keepers of society. This is an unwise situation, to say the least.

"As a society we have allowed far too much leeway for companies. It is important we see over-leveraging for what it is: a large negative externality that society has been forced to support. It is time to look at this problem head on, and make the required changes."

The campaign highlights how this has worked effectively in India and quotes Romesh Sobti, the CEO of IndusInd Bank, who says that "on the topic of corporate over-leveraging, this country [India] didn't allow that … In the good old days, 25 years ago, how much credit you would give to a corporate was determined by regulation. Need-based capital. So regulation has worked in this country."

Sukhdev says the movement will campaign for three other key changes which it believes are needed to help establish a green economy; the imposition of taxes on resource extraction, for businesses to be transparent about their impacts on society, and the creation of rules to make companies more accountable in the way they advertise products and services.

Taxes on resource extraction

These aim to make corporations use fewer resources while delivering the same or higher levels of products and services. This would involve taxing coal, petroleum, and many other minerals to steer the market away from resource-intensive growth and towards smart-technology industries in renewable energy, clean water, new and better materials, and waste management.

Reporting

The campaign says companies are able to hide most of the information about how their products are produced because they are not required to measureor disclose their broader footprint.

Accountable advertising

The current corporate model rests on taking advantage of human insecurities, turning "wants" into "needs," which can only be satisfied by new products. Corporation 2020 calls for advertising restrictions on products to be extended to other individual goods and sectors.

Sukhdev says he hopes the campaign will achieve twin objectives. First, he believes many NGOs have not recognised that changing the legal status of companies "is actually the single most important and urgent underlying societal change to achieve many of their diverse goals."

Second, he says that there are so many different agendas at Rio+20 that it is important to help governments focus on the most pressing issues.

Sukhdev is not so naïve as to think the campaign is going to create instant results but hopes that it will help change the groundswell of opinion.

"If four or five large NGOs and another 40 to 50 small NGOs at Rio see why this theme is so critical to achieve their goals, and if another 10 to 20 companies decide to follow in the footsteps of Puma and others, and even if four to five governments each in developing and developed nations get influenced into examining my recommendations to help "prioritise" policy reforms, that will be a great start."